As a healthcare startup, you are vitally important to changing the healthcare industry for the better. In an industry that has massive costs, poor access to care, and unnecessary complexity, startups creating new innovations are key to solving these problems.
However, as many of the products startups are selling into the healthcare industry don’t have wide adoption (yet), finding the people who are interested in purchasing your product can be a large and overwhelming hurdle to overcome.
In order to get to the point of selling your product to a customer, as a startup, you must focus on generating leads and establishing trust. By generating leads, you will generate interest in potential buyers over time, and therefore, grow your market. Furthermore, if you are trusted by the audience and potential customers, willingness to buy a solution will increase, creating value for your startup.
If you only do direct sales, you’ll live in product-land and won’t be able to nurture your prospects along the problem-solution-product buyers’ journey.
That means that lead generation needs to become a core competency of your startup.
The following lead generating tactics will help you effectively market your growing healthcare startup and solution and establish trust with your target market.
Audience Building
This lead generation tactic involves determining your targeted audience and then consistently showing up in front of them with value.
It’s incredibly powerful because instead of a one-time lead magnet or webinar, you get their permission to show up often to provide value and establish trust that you wouldn’t be able to create elsewhere.
Helpful channels for audience-building are LinkedIn personal profiles, Facebook Groups, and Zoom Stand-ups.
At Jumpstart, we’ve just released our own healthcare network called the Jumpstart Refinery where all healthcare stakeholders can engage and support one another in one centralized, online location. Our friend, Bryan Loomis, has leveraged the power of Slack to host his healthcare community platform, called Viral Healthcare Founders.
Wherever you choose to be, just be sure it is where your audience is and that you are contributing value to the conversation so you can eventually build the rapport you need to eventually transition into sales.
Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are extremely effective for not only capturing your target audience but also convincing them they have a problem that your solution will solve.
By sharing content in exchange for audience emails, you will capture their information that you can then use in the future to keep your company top-of-mind for the potential lead.
The important thing is to use your lead magnet to attract the right lead. When deciding the topic of content for your lead magnet, be sure it is something that will provide value to your target customer so you attract the types of prospects you want to work with and repel everyone else.
If your solution is common, a case study can do the trick, otherwise, try a PDF download centered around the problem you solve. Whatever route you take, be sure to always require an email in exchange for the download, so you can continue engaging with that lead.
Webinars
Webinars are another extremely effective lead generation tactic that can be used to not only capture leads but also establish yourself as an industry expert, which in turn establishes trust.
There are two types of webinars startups can use as part of their marketing strategy.
One type is an event webinar that is value driven. The purpose of hosting an event webinar is to spark interest in your startup and inspire the audience to do independent research on your company and product.
An event webinar can consist of the founders of the healthcare startup discussing a topic relevant to healthcare and your specific company.
For example, Jumpstart Foundry hosted an event webinar called, The Founder Perspective of the JSF Experience. The webinar included two founders from the 2020 portfolio cohort to share their JSF experience.
The second type of webinar focuses on sales. The goal here is to take your buyer all the way across the problem-solution-product journey while you have their captive attention.
For a sales webinar, the title is incredibly important to capture interest and drive attendance. The best way to get people to attend your webinar is by advertising around the problem your solution seeks to solve – e.g. “5 Ways to Reduce Hospital Readmissions”.
Blogs
Almost everyone these days has a blog in some form or another. But, too often companies fail to address the WHY behind the blog when building out the strategy for it (assuming there is even a strategy at all).
Blogs are extremely effective for driving organic traffic to your site by increasing your site’s SEO for the target keywords your audience is researching. When a blog is executed effectively, it can also create an opportunity for someone to continue digesting content on your website that can lead them to a possible conversion opportunity.
However, if you do not establish a strategy behind your blog, you will most likely see zero to little increased organic traffic that will generate the type of audience you are trying to capture. Being mindful of blog structure, keywords, call to actions, and the overall customer journey are all key components to making your blog a successful lead generation tactic.
The four tactics discussed above are crucial to attaining the market status you need to do direct sales effectively. Direct sales is the final stage to hook your customer and sell your product.
For B2B (business-to-business), these tactics usually look like product demos, free trials, or pilots. For B2C (business-to-customer), you may push them straight to a payment gateway. Whatever your final conversion activity looks like, if you’ve effectively executed the strategies above, you should have already established the credibility you need to quickly close your next sale.
Conclusion
Healthcare startups take time, energy, and capital to grow. However, the tactics discussed — audience, lead magnets, webinars and blogs — can assure that you’re using your resources effectively and getting more revenue, thus increasing your impact.
Determining your audience and prospects, building trust, and staying in touch via social media, emails, and webinars are key to growing your startup in the long haul.
Doing this through engaging forms of communication and outreach will help to make your company’s brand recognizable and sought after by the audience you can best serve.
This blog was written in partnership with Bryan Loomis, Founder of Viral Healthcare Founders.
